Economist Massimo Lo Cicero has passed away at the age of 72. A meticulous scholar and analyst of macroeconomic issues in the South, he was a brilliant mind, as his writings remind us, but even more so what he taught to the thousands of students who graduated with him and who, today, hold top positions in society and in strategic places in companies, institutions and banking foundations. With many of them he maintained a very close and affectionate relationship, always ready to dispense advice and motivate them professionally. A teacher to so many because of the clarity with which he could grasp the complex dynamics blocking growth in the South. In the last two years an illness blocked precisely that lively word and his never superficial, at times even amusing thought supported by data, graphs, suggestions such as the famous “West Comma”, the Turin-Naples axis and the Milan-Matera-Bari axis, which allowed him to express the most complex contradictions of the Italian South. So he tried to represent with a drawing, with a graph, what words no longer allowed him to express. At the age of 22 he graduated in economics, in 1989 he joined the Order of Journalists, and in 1992 he received the Ischia Prize for Economic Journalism. Although he came from the ranks of the Neapolitan PCI party, for which he had also been a city councilor, he was chosen at only 27 by Christian Democrat Ferdinando Ventriglia as a board member first at Isveimer, then at the then Banco di Napoli. Lo Cicero has held hundreds of positions as advisor to leading Italian companies.
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